Friday, January 01, 2016

newyorker |
It’s hard to remember a time when Rahm Emanuel wasn’t a Democratic
Party superstar. Go back to 1991, when the thirty-two-year-old took
over fund-raising for Bill Clinton. He was soon renowned for
making the staff come to work on Sundays, shrieking into the phone to
donors things like “Five thousand dollars is an insult! You’re a
twenty-five-thousand-dollar person!”—and, not incidentally, helping
Clinton afford the blitz of TV commercials that saved him from the
Gennifer Flowers scandal, clearing his course to the White House. The
legend continued through this past April, when Rahm—in Chicago and
D.C., he’s known by that single name—won a second term as the mayor of
Chicago in a come-from-behind landslide.

Now the sins of Emanuel are finally catching up with him. Lucky for
him,
however, the compounding police-shooting scandal has erased from the
news a peccadillo from this past November: the mayor’s press team
was
eavesdropping and recording reporters while they interviewed aldermen critical of the
mayor. A spokesman responded to the press by saying that their only
intent was also “to make sure reporters have what you need, which is
exactly what you have here.” That made no sense. But then so much of
the legend of Rahm Emanuel’s brilliant career makes little sense. The
bigger question, perhaps, is what this says about a political party and
the political press that bought the legend in the first place.